Traditionally, voting booths have been structured to afford privacy to the individual voter. Even when ballots were cast by an individual marking the selections in writing and depositing the paper ballot in a sealed box or other depository, means were provided to conceal the voter from people in the voting area.
The advent of the mechanical voting machine provided a single complex structure by which voters automatically concealed themselves by engaging a lever that both set the voting mechanism for vote selection and surrounded the voter with a curtain. The mechanical voting machine required a relatively large and heavy structure to satisfy the capacity demanded for the typical election poll.
To this day, the voting for government officials occurs, at most, only a few times each year. Thus, voting booths must be movable and capable of being stored. Logically, storage of voting booths should be at the facility at which the voting takes place; i.e. a local civic building such as a school, town hall, post office etc. Naturally, it is desirable that storage requirements be kept to a minimum because the typical voting location usually requires the use of all available space for the principal daily activities for which the building is intended.
Recent efforts have been made to develop lightweight portable voting booth structures that can be stored off-site. Collapsible cardboard voting booth structures have been proposed as seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,569,564, 4,445,731 and 3,531,170. Another approach has been the multi-purpose voting booth wherein the structure can be converted to a lecturn, dressing room or other function when it is not required for voting. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,484,787, 4,733,507 and 4,660,904 are illustrative of this approach.
Recently electronic devices have been developed to provide a reliable and confidential means for accepting and tabulating votes. By the use of microprocessor or microcomputer implemented electronics, an actual voting mechanism with the capacity for a typical election poll can be provided that is relatively small and lightweight; i.e. less than twenty pounds.